The review of God In Your Body that I posted yesterday was written on a plane; in advance of South by Southwest this coming weekend, I'm spending the week in San Antonio visiting my family. As a result, blogging is likely to be light. Instead of spending my days steeping in Torah and rabbinic texts, and dipping regularly into the braided river of my blog aggregator to keep tabs on blogosphere conversations, I'm immersing in family time and in my old hometown.

I'm writing a lot while I'm here, as I always do. I jot notes about the fat mourning doves on the telephone wire, and the early mountain laurel blooms (as sugar-sweet as hyacinth or lilac, and as pale purple, too), and the taste and feel of good homemade corn tortillas with fire-roasted salsa. What it's like to see girls at Starbucks in the afternoon wearing my alma mater's uniform -- how young they look, and how my body still remembers those crisp folds and the squeak of new saddle shoes.

I write about what it's like to see one of my nephews turn sixteen, to walk with my mother along the winding streets of our old neighborhood toward the skeet shooting range, to hear my father's stories about the drive-in that used to abut the Liberty Bar. Every night before bed I type notes and remembrances, details I don't want to lose when I return to Massachusetts again. I try to describe for myself what it feels like to visit the place where I grew up.

But none of this is the stuff of my usual blogging life. And my evening journallings aren't designed for public consumption, anyway; they're more like mnemonic devices, meant to jog my memory later when I want to re-inhabit these days. So I thank y'all in advance for graciously forgiving my relative absence from the blogosphere. If you're going to be at South by Southwest, do drop me a line; I always love putting faces with blog URLs and email addresses! And otherwise, I hope your week is as rich and interesting as mine is proving to be.

Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, SanAntonio.